THE CLIENT
Hockingstuart Glen Iris handles real estate sales and rentals in the inner Melbourne regions of Boroondara and Stonnington. The agency’s modern office uses the latest technologies across many business areas. Its website is one of the most visited of all Victorian estate agents and property magazine one of the most widely distributed. The business also has an ethos of giving back to the local community through sponsoring schools, sporting clubs and other
local groups.
THE CHALLENGE
The agency’s large rent roll resulted in a high volume of invoices needing to be processed. To speed up the process, hockingstuart Glen Iris began using a barcode system, with a receptionist creating barcodes and entering the payment. Once invoices were paid, they were matched up with owner statements, which also had to be printed out then posted together. Landlords wanting their paperwork emailed meant the agency singly scanned documents, attached them to an email to send individually. Although the barcode scanner was a quicker data-entry method, invoices still had to be handled one by one, which was becoming too time-consuming.
“When Viatek ScanAssist creates the payments in Console, it’s just super, super, fast. I’m pretty quick, but there is no way I could do it in that amount of time. The whole process now takes less than a quarter of the time I used to spend on it. The program is absolutely brilliant, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
THE SOLUTION
A staff member who had previously worked at another agency had used a document-capture solution but found its benefits small due to the high error rate and time spent fixing issues, as well as its incomplete integration with Console.
After reading about Viatek ScanAssist through Console’s newsletter, hockingstuart Glen Iris chose to trial the solution. It did not take long for the staff involved in that to see the benefits and present a convincing case to the Director of the efficiencies and productivity to be gained.
"I’m training Grace in my role for when I go on maternity leave. It used to take about 2.5 hours to get all the invoice-entering done before a landlord run. Now we’re using ScanAssist, and it’s nowhere near that. After showing her one day, Grace asked me what we did next, and I said: “well I used to still be entering invoices!"
THE RESULT
Already using GatewayLive to great effect, hockingstuart Glen Iris has found the pairing with Viatek ScanAssist to be invaluable to business operations.
The result has streamlined processing and quartered the time hockingstuart Glen Iris now spends on handling rental-associated paperwork. Postage has dramatically dropped with only a few landlords requesting hard copies.
Abby Brown, who is the Rental & Sales Trust Administrator as well as dealing with other accounts and payroll, says “the resulting freed-up time can now be spent focusing on other areas to grow and consolidate the business.”
“The Director has always been pushing more analysis on numbers, which I’ve never really had time to implement, let alone concentrate on, simply because of lack of time. But now we can actually spend time doing these sorts of things, which will really help the business. Data entry and handling lots of paperwork is not the best use of my time and is certainly not the best for productivity, but the ScanAssist has changed all that.”
“I have been working in real estate for 16 years and in property management for over 10. I think for at least 9.5 of those ten years, I have been waiting for a program like Viatek ScanAssist to save time and to streamline processes. It saves so much time! I just think how many hours per week, per year over the last ten years have I spent on paperwork, which has now been eliminated.”
“On top of all the streamlining, the customisation has been fantastic. What we have has really been built for us and how we want it. There was no “generic-for-everybody, and this is just the way it is, we can’t change it” type thing from Viatek. The level of customer service and expertise that we have received right from the very first conversation through to the ongoing support has left us highly impressed.”
“The implementation was a positive experience too. Due to our IT set up, our remote IT team had to be involved, but the Viatek team just spoke to them directly and didn’t make us the middleman, which was really good because we don’t speak their language – don’t have time to spend on that either.”
Abby says the training was straightforward and comprehensive. She has also found it easy to teach her replacement who will take over while she’s on maternity leave.
